Few middle schoolers are as clued in to their mathematical strengths and weakness as Moheeb Kaied. Now a seventh grader at Brooklyn’s Middle School 442, he can easily rattle off his computational profile.

“Let’s see,” he said one morning this spring. “I can find the area and perimeter of a polygon. I can solve mathematical and real-world problems using a coordinate plane. I still need to get better at dividing multiple-digit numbers, which means I should probably practice that more.”

Moheeb is part of a new program that is challenging the way teachers and students think about academic accomplishments, and his school is one of hundreds that have done away with traditional letter grades inside their classrooms. At M.S. 442, students are encouraged to focus instead on mastering a set of grade-level skills, like writing a scientific hypothesis or identifying themes in a story, moving to the next set of skills when they have demonstrated that they are ready. In these schools, there is no such thing as a C or a D for a lazily written term paper. There is no failing. The only goal is to learn the material, sooner or later.

Besides, Kentrianakis insists, “This year I will be vindicated.” Come Aug. 21, the Internet will be flooded with videos of eclipse watchers in ecstasy. Few can witness such a spectacle and not be moved.

“It unlocks you,” he says. “I don’t know why. It is so visceral. It is the meaning of the word awe, awe-struck.” And then he’s off, waxing rhapsodic about the light, the symmetry, the electricity in the air, the feeling of cosmic insignificance. It takes him a few minutes to come back to Earth.

“I wish I could describe it in a normal fashion.” He sighs. “If I could give the magic words . . . if I say the right thing, I can get them to go.”

But all Kentrianakis can offer is his own fervor and this promise: “Wait till you see it. Then you will know.”

What matters is how edtech is used. One way it can help is through bespoke instruction. Ever since Philip II of Macedon hired Aristotle to prepare his son Alexander for Greatness, rich parents have paid for tutors. Reformers from São Paulo to Stockholm think that edtech can put individual attention within reach of all pupils. American schools are embracing the model most readily. A third of pupils are in a school district that has pledged to introduce “personalised, digital learning”. The methods of groups like Summit Public Schools, whose software was written for nothing by Facebook engineers, are being copied by hundreds of schools.

In India, where about half of children leave primary school unable to read a simple text, the curriculum goes over many pupils’ heads. “Adaptive” software such as Mindspark can work out what a child knows and pose questions accordingly. A recent paper found that Indian children using Mindspark after school made some of the largest gains in maths and reading of any education study in poor countries.

The other way edtech can aid learning is by making schools more productive. In California schools are using software to overhaul the conventional model. Instead of textbooks, pupils have “playlists”, which they use to access online lessons and take tests. The software assesses children’s progress, lightening teachers’ marking load and giving them insight on their pupils. Saved teachers’ time is allocated to other tasks, such as fostering pupils’ social skills or one-on-one tuition. A study in 2015 suggested that children in early adopters of this model score better in tests than their peers at other schools.

"In San Francisco’s public schools, Marc Benioff, the chief executive of Salesforce, is giving middle school principals $100,000 "innovation grants” and encouraging them to behave more like start-up founders and less like bureaucrats.

In Maryland, Texas, Virginia and other states, Netflix’s chief, Reed Hastings, is championing a popular math-teaching program where Netflix-like algorithms determine which lessons students see.

And in more than 100 schools nationwide, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief, is testing one of his latest big ideas: software that puts children in charge of their own learning, recasting their teachers as facilitators and mentors.

In the space of just a few years, technology giants have begun remaking the very nature of schooling on a vast scale, using some of the same techniques that have made their companies linchpins of the American economy. Through their philanthropy, they are influencing the subjects that schools teach, the classroom tools that teachers choose and fundamental approaches to learning.

The involvement by some of the wealthiest and most influential titans of the 21st century amounts to a singular experiment in education, with millions of students serving as de facto beta testers for their ideas. Some tech leaders believe that applying an engineering mind-set can improve just about any system, and that their business acumen qualifies them to rethink American education.

“They are experimenting collectively and individually in what kinds of models can produce better results,” said Emmett D. Carson, chief executive of Silicon Valley Community Foundation, which manages donor funds for Mr. Hastings, Mr. Zuckerberg and others. “Given the changes in innovation that are underway with artificial intelligence and automation, we need to try everything we can to find which pathways work.”

But the philanthropic efforts are taking hold so rapidly that there has been little public scrutiny."

"The soul of our beloved City is deeply rooted in a history that has evolved over thousands of years; rooted in a diverse people who have been here together every step of the way — for both good and for ill. It is a history that holds in its heart the stories of Native Americans — the Choctaw, Houma Nation, the Chitimacha. Of Hernando De Soto, Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, the Acadians, the Islenos, the enslaved people from Senegambia, Free People of Colorix, the Haitians, the Germans, both the empires of France and Spain. The Italians, the Irish, the Cubans, the south and central Americans, the Vietnamese and so many more.

You see — New Orleans is truly a city of many nations, a melting pot, a bubbling caldron of many cultures. There is no other place quite like it in the world that so eloquently exemplifies the uniquely American motto: e pluribus unum — out of many we are one. But there are also other truths about our city that we must confront. New Orleans was America’s largest slave market: a port where hundreds of thousands of souls were bought, sold and shipped up the Mississippi River to lives of forced labor of misery of rape, of torture. America was the place where nearly 4000 of our fellow citizens were lynched, 540 alone in Louisiana; where the courts enshrined ‘separate but equal’; where Freedom riders coming to New Orleans were beaten to a bloody pulp. So when people say to me that the monuments in question are history, well what I just described is real history as well, and it is the searing truth.

And it immediately begs the questions, why there are no slave ship monuments, no prominent markers on public land to remember the lynchings or the slave blocks; nothing to remember this long chapter of our lives; the pain, the sacrifice, the shame... all of it happening on the soil of New Orleans. So for those self-appointed defenders of history and the monuments, they are eerily silent on what amounts to this historical malfeasance, a lie by omission. There is a difference between remembrance of history and reverence of it.

For America and New Orleans, it has been a long, winding road, marked by great tragedy and great triumph. But we cannot be afraid of our truth. As President George W. Bush said at the dedication ceremony for the National Museum of African American History & Culture, “A great nation does not hide its history. It faces its flaws and corrects them.” So today I want to speak about why we chose to remove these four monuments to the Lost Cause of the Confederacy, but also how and why this process can move us towards healing and understanding of each other. So, let’s start with the facts.

The historic record is clear, the Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, and P.G.T. Beauregard statues were not erected just to honor these men, but as part of the movement which became known as The Cult of the Lost Cause. This ‘cult’ had one goal — through monuments and through other means — to rewrite history to hide the truth, which is that the Confederacy was on the wrong side of humanity. First erected over 166 years after the founding of our city and 19 years after the end of the Civil War, the monuments that we took down were meant to rebrand the history of our city and the ideals of a defeated Confederacy. It is self-evident that these men did not fight for the United States of America, They fought against it. They may have been warriors, but in this cause they were not patriots. These statues are not just stone and metal. They are not just innocent remembrances of a benign history. These monuments purposefully celebrate a fictional, sanitized Confederacy; ignoring the death, ignoring the enslavement, and the terror that it actually stood for."

But critics of Ms. DeVos’s move this week are especially concerned about a particular piece of guidance from the Obama administration she struck down: that the Education Department should place great weight on a company’s track record when selecting student loan vendors, and should steer away from companies with histories of shoddy service or other problems.

Essentially, that puts Navient — the nation’s largest federal student loan servicer, which faces a spate of regulatory and legal problems related to its business practices — on stronger footing than it had been in bidding for agency contracts.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau responded to Ms. DeVos’s memo with a pointed note saying that borrowers “should be able to repay their debt without having to deal with illegal loan servicing practices.”

If the department does go forward with a single portal, Ms. DeVos’s memo seems to improve Navient’s shot at winning the bid, according to procurement experts.

In one of the memos rejected by Ms. DeVos, her predecessor as education secretary, John B. King Jr., said that a company’s past performance should be “the most important noncost factor.” Analysts interpreted that as a signal that Navient’s track record would hamper its bid.

With those priorities now scrapped, the company is back in the running, said Rohit Chopra, a former student loan ombudsman with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau who also briefly worked for the Education Department.

Mr. Tarkan of Compass Point agreed. He previously considered the joint bid of Nelnet and Great Lakes the front-runner, but Navient’s size makes it a very strong competitor — once past performance is played down.

For students, the decision is about more than just what company name appears on their monthly statement. The loan servicer has tremendous power to guide them through repayment options. Some plans stretch payment periods out for as long as 30 years, and others help qualifying students get a portion of their debt forgiven. Strategic use of those paths can trim — or inflate — the sum that a student ultimately pays by tens of thousands of dollars.

"It was bad enough late last month when the Education Department, in a legal filing, informed the nation’s public servants that they shouldn’t trust its administrator’s word about whether their student loans qualify for its debt forgiveness program. • But the panic among borrowers that the newfound uncertainty unleashed helps illuminate an additional problem with the public service loan forgiveness program: Many people who believe that they qualify — and entered graduate school, borrowed piles of money and chose employers accordingly — may not realize that they are not making qualifying payments or that certain loans are not eligible for forgiveness. • The program, which began in 2007, was enacted with what was supposed to be a clear-cut proposition: People who worked for 10 years in public service jobs and made regular payments would have the remainder of their federal student loans forgiven. A wide variety of jobs were supposed to qualify, from nonprofit work to teaching in a public school or practicing medicine at a public hospital. • But now, 10 years later, the legal filing has sown all manner of confusion — which itself comes in the wake of a disheartening amount of misdirection given to borrowers. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau receives plenty of complaints about loan servicers offering incorrect information. And well-meaning employers may also pass along bad advice."

London — Whenever I was encouraged by my elders to pick up a book, I was often told, “Read so as to know the world.” And it is true; books have invited me into different countries, states of mind, social conditions and historical epochs; they have offered me a place at the most unusual gatherings.

I have had access to private rooms, overheard exquisite conversations and been able to observe subtle changes in another person’s inner life. Books have shown me horror and beauty. All this is true.

But the most magical moments in reading occur not when I encounter something unknown but when I happen upon myself, when I read a sentence that perfectly describes something I have known or felt all along. I am reminded then that I am really no different from anyone else.

Perhaps that is the secret motive behind every library: to stumble upon ourselves in the lives and lands and tongues of others. And the more foreign the setting, the more poignant the event seems. For a strange thing occurs then: A distance widens and then it is crossed.

So a digital temperance movement would start by resisting the wiring of everything, and seek to create more spaces in which internet use is illegal, discouraged or taboo. Toughen laws against cellphone use in cars, keep computers out of college lecture halls, put special “phone boxes” in restaurants where patrons would be expected to deposit their devices, confiscate smartphones being used in museums and libraries and cathedrals, create corporate norms that strongly discourage checking email in a meeting.

Then there are the starker steps. Get computers — all of them — out of elementary schools, where there is no good evidence that they improve learning. Let kids learn from books for years before they’re asked to go online for research; let them play in the real before they’re enveloped by the virtual.

Then keep going. The age of consent should be 16, not 13, for Facebook accounts. Kids under 16 shouldn’t be allowed on gaming networks. High school students shouldn’t bring smartphones to school. Kids under 13 shouldn’t have them at all. If you want to buy your child a cellphone, by all means: In the new dispensation, Verizon and Sprint will have some great “voice-only” plans available for minors.

You know how important it is for kids to develop life skills like managing emotions or learning to make better decisions — skills that are actually as important as doing well on an academic test. The problem is, you don’t know where to start. Or maybe you did start by buying some expensive prepackaged program that just isn’t working for your school’s particular needs.

Now what?

Associate Professor Stephanie Jones and her team at Easel Lab’s SEL Analysis Project came up with an idea called “kernel of practice” — evidence-based strategies and activities that educators can easily use with their students that are free and flexible. (Schools pick and chose which strategies they want to try.) The team shared strategies for elementary schools:

Dyslexia affects up to 1 in 5 people, but the experience of dyslexia isn't always the same. This difficulty in processing language exists along a spectrum -- one that doesn't necessarily fit with labels like "normal" and "defective." Kelli Sandman-Hurley urges us to think again about dyslexic brain function and to celebrate the neurodiversity of the human brain."

This lesson includes an animated video and follow up questions to check for comprehension and deeper understanding. Then the lesson provides recommendations for deeper engagement with the topic and ends with an invitation to participate in a discussion forum.

"Institutions of higher education are dependent on state and federal funding, including tax exemptions, research funds and scholarship support. Pressures from within also exist, often inspired by students and faculty members seeking to create a consensus of belief that can marginalize disagreement and dissent. Nevertheless, the key to the astonishing success and international superiority of the American university, particularly in science and engineering, has been its resilient commitment to freedom and nondiscrimination, and its respect for truth, no matter how uncomfortable.

The presidents of our colleges and universities must defend the principles that have enabled institutions of higher education to flourish. These are freedom and tolerance, and openness to individuals no matter their national origin or religion. The actions and spirit of the new administration threaten the American university’s core values.

The voices of our leaders in higher education must be heard in opposition. The cause is not partisan. The cause is a democracy where citizens of the entire world are welcome, minorities are protected and dissent respected. Such a democracy is the only context in which research and learning and the pursuit of knowledge can thrive. The time to act together is upon us. The world must have no doubt about where the American university stands."

McKee cautions, however, that researchers cannot extrapolate from the numbers and come to conclusions about CTE.

All the brains studied were donated, she says. "Families don't donate brains of their loved ones unless they're concerned about the person. So all the players in this study, on some level, were symptomatic. That leaves you with a very skewed population."

Still, McKee is adamant about one point.

"We're seeing this [CTE] in a very large number that participated in football for many years. So while we don't know the exact risk and we don't know the exact number, we know this is a problem in football."

Longtime concussion expert Dr. Munro Cullum says the study is helpful for several reasons. "It obviously adds to the cases in the literature," he says. "It has expanded the age range [of those with CTE] beyond just retired NFL players. And [researchers] did find increasing CTE pathology in the cases [of players] who were older. That's all useful information."

"CHICAGO — The sixth graders at Newton Bateman, a public elementary school here with a classic red brick facade, know the Google drill.

In a social-science class last year, the students each grabbed a Google-powered laptop. They opened Google Classroom, an app where teachers make assignments. Then they clicked on Google Docs, a writing program, and began composing essays.

Looking up from her laptop, Masuma Khan, then 11 years old, said her essay explored how schooling in ancient Athens differed from her own. “Back then, they had wooden tablets and they had to take all of their notes on it,” she said. “Nowadays, we can just do it in Google Docs.”

Chicago Public Schools, the third-largest school district in the United States, with about 381,000 students, is at the forefront of a profound shift in American education: the Googlification of the classroom.

In the space of just five years, Google has helped upend the sales methods companies use to place their products in classrooms. It has enlisted teachers and administrators to promote Google’s products to other schools. It has directly reached out to educators to test its products — effectively bypassing senior district officials. And it has outmaneuvered Apple and Microsoft with a powerful combination of low-cost laptops, called Chromebooks, and free classroom apps."

"AMHERST, Mass. — Does it matter where a writer lived? Can creativity and inspiration insinuate themselves into a physical space, somehow becoming part of the atmosphere? Do you believe in ghosts? • It’s impossible not to think about these things when you visit the Emily Dickinson Museum, which includes the house where Dickinson spent most of her outwardly uneventful life, her fierce mind raging away, quietly producing her profound and enigmatic poetry. Perhaps more than most writers, Dickinson is closely associated with one spot. You can’t really separate the poet from the house. • On a recent afternoon, I found myself all alone in Dickinson’s bedroom, having paid $100 for the chance to spend an hour there. (The price has now increased; people can also pay for two hours or to go in with a friend.) It was one of those days. I’d arrived by train and cab from New York, my nerves a little jangly, my head buzzing, fretting about being late, compulsively checking my phone. And now here I was, in a place redolent of a long-ago past, trying to corral my thoughts, my pencil poised over a blank page in my notebook."

In March, Atwood came to New York City, for the annual National Book Critics Circle award ceremony, where she was being given a lifetime-achievement award. (Atwood recently remarked, on an Ask Me Anything thread on Reddit, that she is at the “Gold Watch and Goodbye” phase of her career.) The ceremony was held at the New School, and the collective mood of the assembled editors, critics, and writers—a concentration of New York’s liberal intelligentsia in its purest form—was celebratory, as such events always are, but also agitated and galvanized. That morning, President Trump had issued his first federal budget plan, and he had proposed eliminating the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, as well as ending funding for public broadcasting, and closing agencies devoted to social welfare and environmental oversight. The crowd felt like bruised defenders of a civilization that they hadn’t realized was susceptible to attack.

Trump’s agenda was criticized by many of the award recipients. Michelle Dean, a young Canadian writer who won the association’s annual prize for excellence in reviewing, declared, “The struggle we presently find ourselves in is not a mistake, and not a fluke. . . . It crept into our lives while we were napping. Power sometimes works that way, but I still wish we hadn’t missed it.” Lately, Dean added, she’d been rereading “The Handmaid’s Tale” for the first time since high school: “There are so few books like that being published right now. The application of literary intelligence to this question of power—it’s kind of out of style. And many writers just seem more interested in exploring the self.”

Two days before Trump’s Inauguration, Atwood had published an essay in The Nation, in which she questioned the generalities sometimes made by left-leaning intellectuals about the role of the artist in public life. “Artists are always being lectured on their moral duty, a fate other professionals—dentists, for example—generally avoid,” she observed. “There’s nothing inherently sacred about films and pictures and writers and books. ‘Mein Kampf’ was a book.” In fact, she said, writers and other artists are particularly prone to capitulating to authoritarian pressure; the isolation inherent in the craft makes them psychologically vulnerable. “The pen is mightier than the sword, but only in retrospect,” she wrote. “At the time of combat, those with the swords generally win.”

At the New School, when Atwood, wearing a long black dress with a patterned black shawl draped around her shoulders, was summoned to the stage, she took a cheekier tack than she had taken in the Nation essay. “I’m very, very, very happy to be here, because they let me across the border,” she said, her voice low and deliberate. Atwood characterized literary criticism as a thankless task. “Authors are sensitive beings,” she observed, to titters of amusement. “You, therefore, know that all positive adjectives applied to them will be forgotten, yet anything even faintly smacking of imperfection in their work will rankle until the end of time.” An author whom she had reviewed once berated her use of the adjective “accomplished,” she recalled. “ ‘Don’t you know that “accomplished” is an insult?’ ” she deadpanned. “I didn’t know.”

Then her remarks took an exhortatory turn. “Why do I do such a painful task?” she said. “For the same reason I give blood. We must all do our part, because if nobody contributes to this worthy enterprise then there won’t be any, just when it’s most needed.” Now is one of those times, she warned: “Never has American democracy felt so challenged.” The necessary conditions for dictatorship, Atwood noted, include the shutting down of independent media, which mutes the expression of contrary or subversive opinions; writers form part of the fragile barrier standing between authoritarian control and open democracy. “There are still places on this planet where to be caught reading you, or even me, would incur a severe penalty,” Atwood said. “I hope there will soon be fewer such places.” Her voice dropped to a stage whisper: “I am not holding my breath.”

In the meantime, she thanked the book critics, though even her gratitude carried a note of subversion. “I will cherish this lifetime-achievement award from you, though, like all sublunar blessings, it is a mixed one,” she said. “Why do I only get one lifetime? Where did this lifetime go?”

Public radio and television broadcasters are girding for battle after the Trump administration proposed a drastic cutback that they have long dreaded: the defunding of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

The potential elimination of about $445 million in annual funding, which helps local TV and radio stations subscribe to NPR and Public Broadcasting Service programming, could be devastating for affiliates in smaller markets that already operate on a shoestring budget.

Patricia Harrison, the corporation’s president, warned in a statement on Thursday that the Trump budget proposal, if enacted, could cause “the collapse of the public media system itself.”

I have come to be much more curious about boredom in school, for a number of reasons. First, it simply seems a shame that most kids seem to become less curious, rather than more, as they move through school (and through their young lives). There is a lot of talk in education circles about the need to create "lifelong learners" who can adapt to an ever-changing world over the course of their lives. I don't see how we create lifelong learners if curiosity wanes rather than grows over time in school. Second, boredom is not uniform in school, which suggests it may not be as inevitable as we might think. Third, boredom is not always a code word for hard work, so it is not the case that the cure for boredom--sacrificing rigor and hard work--will necessarily be worse than the disease. I have seen my own kids, as well as others, work quite hard on projects in which they are interested, whether school related or of their own initiative. Finally, while worrying about boredom might seem like a luxury, or even an elitist concern, boredom is frequently cited as a major reason for why kids drop out of school--even more so than academic failure.

“But the biggest shift we need,” Rose believes, is much more elemental. “We need to get away from thinking that the opposite of ‘bored’ is ‘entertained.’ It’s ‘engaged.’” It’s not about pumping cartoons and virtual reality games into the classroom, it’s about finding ways to make curriculum more resonant, personalized, and meaningful for every student. “Engagement is very meaningful at a neurological level, at a learning level, and a behavioral level. When kids are engaged, life is so much easier.”

"The advantages of having an enemy are well-known. In Orwell's dystopian novel "1984" -- suddenly a new best-seller in the Trump era -- the masses engage in a daily mandatory ritual, the "Two Minutes of Hate," during which their anger is feverishly stoked against the foe of the moment. Dictators, strongmen and autocrats have practiced the art of drumming up loathing toward others to great effect.

Trump is no dictator, but he does have strong authoritarian tendencies and, like other demagogues, he knows that perceived enemies can help him fire up the base, rally the crowds and shift responsibility. Don't look at me, this script cries out; look over there, there is a threat, a danger, a foe.

When it comes to enemies, a demonized media is even more useful than the average antagonist.

Trump's real nemesis is the truth. By attacking the media, he opens up a new line of attack against facts, his true target. He is, after all, the Gaslighter in Chief. He is trying to confuse the public so that they will not believe inconvenient truths."

Sharing your scoops to your social media accounts is a must to distribute your curated content. Not only will it drive traffic and leads through your content, but it will help show your expertise with your followers.

Integrating your curated content to your website or blog will allow you to increase your website visitors’ engagement, boost SEO and acquire new visitors. By redirecting your social media traffic to your website, Scoop.it will also help you generate more qualified traffic and leads from your curation work.

Distributing your curated content through a newsletter is a great way to nurture and engage your email subscribers will developing your traffic and visibility.
Creating engaging newsletters with your curated content is really easy.